Special to WorldTribune.com

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz issued the following response to Donald Trump’s statement supporting genderless bathrooms:

HOUSTON, Texas – “Donald Trump is no different from politically correct leftist elites. Today, he joined them in calling for grown men to be allowed to use little girls’ public restrooms. As the dad of young daughters, I dread what this will mean for our daughters — and for our sisters and our wives. It is a reckless policy that will endanger our loved ones.

“Yet Donald stands up for this irresponsible policy while at the same time caving in on defending individual freedoms and religious liberty. He has succumbed to the Left’s agenda, which is to force Americans to leave God out of public life while paying lip service to false tolerance.

“This is not real tolerance. The Left wants to force its belief system onto Americans across the country and silence people of faith in the public square. Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is all too eager to join them. This simply confirms that the same man who favored partial-birth abortion and still supports public funding for Planned Parenthood will sacrifice principle on the altar of political correctness. Trump will not defeat political correctness. Today he bowed to it.”

Cruz also released the transcript of his appearance on Glenn Beck’s radio show on April 21. Following is an excerpt:

BECK: Let’s just start with the genderless bathrooms… because we were talking about this. North Carolina, Mississippi standing up for the right to practice your religion… You can go get a wedding cake at another store just down the street, I’m sure. Practice your religion and the genderless bathrooms… the UK has just come out with a travel advisory to LBGT in London, in England, that you should be warned about North Carolina and Mississippi.

CRUZ: Well, listen, we have gone off the deep end. This is absurd. Number one, religious liberty is our founding liberty, this country was literally founded by men and women who were fleeing religious oppression and coming to a land where we could live according to our faith and conscience without government getting in the way. It wasn’t too long ago–

BECK: Go ahead —

CRUZ: — that religious liberty was a bipartisan commitment. It has only been in recent years that the modern democratic party, aided and abetted by the mainstream media and Hollywood, has decided religious liberty is inconsistent with their extreme political protections — political bias — and that’s just wrong. I think that the 2016 election will be about many things but one of the things it will be is a religious liberty election. If you believe that the first amendment protects the rights of all of us — of Jews, Christians, Muslims, of atheists, of all of us, to live according to our faith, then there is only one candidate running who has spent his entire adult life fighting to defend religious liberty and the first amendment, and the bill of rights, and the constitution.

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